title: Ensuring the fidelity of recombination in mammalian chromosomes.
abstract: Mammalian cells frequently depend on homologous recombination (HR) to repair DNA damage accurately and to help rescue stalled or collapsed replication forks. The essence of HR is an exchange of nucleotides between identical or nearly identical sequences. Although HR fulfills important biological roles, recombination between inappropriate sequence partners can lead to translocations or other deleterious rearrangements and such events must be avoided. For example, the recombination machinery must follow stringent rules to preclude recombination between the many repetitive elements in a mammalian genome that share significant but imperfect homology. This paper takes a conceptual approach in addressing the homology requirements for recombination in mammalian genomes as well as the general strategy used by cells to reject recombination between similar but imperfectly matched sequences. A mechanism of heteroduplex rejection that involves the unwinding of recombination intermediates that may form between mismatched sequences is discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina, Biological Sciences, 700 Sumter Street, Columbia, SC 29208, USA. awaldman@biol.sc.edu
authors.forename: Alan S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Waldman
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D020137:Base Pair Mismatch; D033481:Chromosomes, Mammalian / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D003434:Crossing Over, Genetic; D004249:DNA Damage; D004260:DNA Repair; D016678:Genome; D006801:Humans; D051379:Mice; D008954:Models, Biological; D008957:Models, Genetic; D009711:Nucleotides / Q000235:genetics; D011995:Recombination, Genetic
chemical_list: D009711:Nucleotides